MAVEN(artist's view) After a 10-month journey, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN ( MAVEN) spacecraft, built by Lockheed M...
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| MAVEN(artist's view) |
MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to survey the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars.
On command from Lockheed Martin’s Mission Support Area near Denver, Colorado, MAVEN's six main engines were fired for a 33-minute burn that slowed the spacecraft by 2,752 mph. This allowed it to be captured by Mars’ gravity and placed into an elliptical polar orbit around the planet that is initially 35 hours long.
MAVEN now joins NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the 2001 Mars Odyssey – both built and operated for NASA by Lockheed Martin – in orbit around the Red Planet.
The telemetry and tracking data were received by NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna station in Canberra, Australia.
Following orbit insertion, MAVEN will begin a six-week commissioning phase that includes maneuvering into its final science orbit and testing the instruments and science-mapping commands.
MAVEN then will begin its one Earth-year primary mission, taking measurements of the composition, structure and escape of gases in Mars’ upper atmosphere and its interaction with the sun and solar wind.
MAVEN was launched abroad ULA Atlas V launcher on Nov. 18, 2013, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
MAVEN carries three instrument packages. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California at Berkeley with support from CU/LASP and Goddard contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet. The Remote Sensing Package, built by CU/LASP, will identify characteristics present throughout the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of atomic particles.
The spacecraft had a launch mass of 2,454 kg, dry mass of 809 kg and payload weighs 65 kg.
